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Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Measurement! What Is It Good For?!

Most things in life have inputs and outputs. You do your homework; you get a grade or, at least, the self-gratification of a job well-done. You put vegetables and fruit in a blender; you get a smoothie. You give your customers 'great' content and hopefully, get engagement and conversion as outputs. As digital marketers, when we release this 'great' content into the ether, how do we know if it was well received or has accomplished the goals we set? That is when data collection, listening, and measurement come into play. In business, it is important to plan how we will measure the outputs of our actions, how frequently and have goals for success and failure and room for improvement. Amber Naslund, SVP of Marketing at Sysomos explains it best when she says, “Measurement is like laundry. It piles up the longer you wait to do it”, expressing the need to routinely check the results of campaigns and marketing efforts.What is Measurement?Measurement in digital marketing is a means of evaluating the effectiveness of the campaigns, online communities and other tactics against business goals and objectives. It is essential to be aware of your starting points (baselines), what you want to achieve (targets) and, how competitors you want to match or surpass doing, as well as your history (benchmarks).Measurement is incredibly important for being able to assess the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts.Types of MeasurementHootsuitecategorises two types of measurement, and defines them as: Quantitative, which focuses on numerical values and their growth and decline over time. Examples include follower growth, click through rate (CTR), and conversion rate (CVR)Qualitative, which is a more nuanced approach to collecting insights and is best done on a post by post basis. Examples include positive and negative sentiments and comments on new product launches.When setting goals for measurement, we typically look at key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversions, engagement rates, bounce rates and sentiments. Measurement ToolsWhile there are many tools you can use formeasurement in digital marketing, here are a few to serve as starting point for your exploration.Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking referral traffic, that is, which channels people are using to find and interact with your business.Sysomosaids in gathering insights, monitoring and analyzing data from your social media that can then be used for decision making. Hootsuitecan be used to measure and manage the performance of your social media networks. Social Mention allows you to search for your company or keywords and gather real-time data about mentions, sentiments, hashtags and more from social media, blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, images, videos and questions. Marketing Grader by HubSpot uses various metrics to determine the strength of your inbound marketing initiatives through social media posts, conversions and frequency of blog posts.Social Media Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have analytics and insights pages you help you track theeffectiveness your posts and ads.As you can imagine, measurement is one of the biggest and most important topics in digital marketing that could have an entire blog solely dedicated to it (and there are many). We will revisit this issue, take a deeper dive into each type of measurement, and review different tools. Until then, click here for more on the topic from one of the best minds in the business, Avinash Kaushik. What tools do you use for measurement? Comment below!Thanks for reading!